Africa
Adaptive Mixing of Auxiliary Losses in Supervised Learning
Sivasubramanian, Durga, Maheshwari, Ayush, Shenoy, Pradeep, AP, Prathosh, Ramakrishnan, Ganesh
In several supervised learning scenarios, auxiliary losses are used in order to introduce additional information or constraints into the supervised learning objective. For instance, knowledge distillation aims to mimic outputs of a powerful teacher model; similarly, in rule-based approaches, weak labeling information is provided by labeling functions which may be noisy rule-based approximations to true labels. We tackle the problem of learning to combine these losses in a principled manner. Our proposal, AMAL, uses a bi-level optimization criterion on validation data to learn optimal mixing weights, at an instance level, over the training data. We describe a meta-learning approach towards solving this bi-level objective and show how it can be applied to different scenarios in supervised learning. Experiments in a number of knowledge distillation and rule-denoising domains show that AMAL provides noticeable gains over competitive baselines in those domains. We empirically analyze our method and share insights into the mechanisms through which it provides performance gains.
Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training
Wang, Liang, Yang, Nan, Huang, Xiaolong, Jiao, Binxing, Yang, Linjun, Jiang, Daxin, Majumder, Rangan, Wei, Furu
This paper presents E5, a family of state-of-the-art text embeddings that transfer well to a wide range of tasks. The model is trained in a contrastive manner with weak supervision signals from our curated large-scale text pair dataset (called CCPairs). E5 can be readily used as a general-purpose embedding model for any tasks requiring a single-vector representation of texts such as retrieval, clustering, and classification, achieving strong performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. We conduct extensive evaluations on 56 datasets from the BEIR and MTEB benchmarks. For zero-shot settings, E5 is the first model that outperforms the strong BM25 baseline on the BEIR retrieval benchmark without using any labeled data. When fine-tuned, E5 obtains the best results on the MTEB benchmark, beating existing embedding models with 40x more parameters.
Face Forgery Detection Based on Facial Region Displacement Trajectory Series
Sun, YuYang, Zhang, ZhiYong, Echizen, Isao, Nguyen, Huy H., Qiu, ChangZhen, Sun, Lu
Deep-learning-based technologies such as deepfakes ones have been attracting widespread attention in both society and academia, particularly ones used to synthesize forged face images. These automatic and professional-skill-free face manipulation technologies can be used to replace the face in an original image or video with any target object while maintaining the expression and demeanor. Since human faces are closely related to identity characteristics, maliciously disseminated identity manipulated videos could trigger a crisis of public trust in the media and could even have serious political, social, and legal implications. To effectively detect manipulated videos, we focus on the position offset in the face blending process, resulting from the forced affine transformation of the normalized forged face. We introduce a method for detecting manipulated videos that is based on the trajectory of the facial region displacement. Specifically, we develop a virtual-anchor-based method for extracting the facial trajectory, which can robustly represent displacement information. This information was used to construct a network for exposing multidimensional artifacts in the trajectory sequences of manipulated videos that is based on dual-stream spatial-temporal graph attention and a gated recurrent unit backbone. Testing of our method on various manipulation datasets demonstrated that its accuracy and generalization ability is competitive with that of the leading detection methods.
Big Tech builds AI with bad data. So scientists sought better data.
Yacine Jernite's fears about bias in artificial intelligence were vividly affirmed in 2017, when a Facebook translation error led Israeli police to arrest a Palestinian construction worker. The man had posted a picture of himself leaning against a bulldozer with the caption, in Arabic, "good morning." Facebook mistakenly translated it, in Hebrew, as "attack them." The error was quickly discovered and the man released, according to a report in Haaretz, but the incident cemented personal concerns about AI for Jernite, who joined Facebook's AI division soon after. As the child of Moroccan parents in post-9/11 America, Jernite said he has "spent hours upon hours in immigration secondary interviews -- in a way that I could not at the time trace to the technology that was being applied."
Senior Connect Signs Letter of Intent for a Business Combination
Senior Connect Acquisition a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, has announced that it has entered into a non-binding letter of intent ("LOI") for a business combination with Avellino Lab USA, Inc. ("Avellino"). Avellino, a leader in precision medicine, is making a global impact in genetics and bringing innovative diagnostics, therapies, and AI-driven data processing to patient care. Recommended AI: How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Changing the Future of Architecture? Under the terms of the LOI, the Company and Avellino would become a combined entity, with Avellino's existing equityholders exchanging their shares in Avellino for equity in the combined public company. The Company expects to announce additional details regarding the proposed business combination when a definitive agreement is executed, which is expected early in the first quarter of 2023.
Synatic Secures $2.5 Million in Seed Extension Funding
Synatic, a leader in data integration and automation, has secured an additional $2.5 million in a seed extension funding round led by Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures and UW Ventures. Synatic will use the additional funds to expand market reach in the United States in preparation for Series A funding early in 2023. Participating in the seed extension round are Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures (AGEV), UW Ventures, Adansonia PE Opportunities VCC, and the Endeavor Harvest Fund. AGEV and UW Ventures are leading investment management and venture firms based in South Africa. Adansonia PE Opportunities VCC (APEO) is an African opportunities permanent capital structure based in Singapore.
Spain vs Morocco round-of-16 predictions: World Cup 2022
Spain take on Morocco in the round-of-16 match at the World Cup 2022 on Tuesday. Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, has analysed more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century to see who is most likely to win. Prediction: Spain head into today's clash with the Atlas Lions as strong favourites but will nevertheless need to produce a much-improved performance from the defeat to Japan in their last outing. Morocco, the last remaining Arab team, is yet to lose a match during the tournament and finished top of Group F ahead of Croatia and Belgium. Looking at all the data, Kashef predicts a 69 percent chance that the 2010 World Cup winners Spain will win and take on Portugal in the quarter-finals on December 10.
Multidimensional analysis using sensor arrays with deep learning for high-precision and high-accuracy diagnosis
Payette, Julie, Cloutier, Sylvain G., Vaussenat, Fabrice
In the upcoming years, artificial intelligence (AI) is going to transform the practice of medicine in most of its specialties. Deep learning can help achieve better and earlier problem detection, while reducing errors on diagnosis. By feeding a deep neural network (DNN) with the data from a low-cost and low-accuracy sensor array, we demonstrate that it becomes possible to significantly improve the measurements' precision and accuracy. The data collection is done with an array composed of 32 temperature sensors, including 16 analog and 16 digital sensors. All sensors have accuracies between 0.5-2.0$^\circ$C. 800 vectors are extracted, covering a range from to 30 to 45$^\circ$C. In order to improve the temperature readings, we use machine learning to perform a linear regression analysis through a DNN. In an attempt to minimize the model's complexity in order to eventually run inferences locally, the network with the best results involves only three layers using the hyperbolic tangent activation function and the Adam Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimizer. The model is trained with a randomly-selected dataset using 640 vectors (80% of the data) and tested with 160 vectors (20%). Using the mean squared error as a loss function between the data and the model's prediction, we achieve a loss of only 1.47x10$^{-4}$ on the training set and 1.22x10$^{-4}$ on the test set. As such, we believe this appealing approach offers a new pathway towards significantly better datasets using readily-available ultra low-cost sensors.
Financial Risk Management on a Neutral Atom Quantum Processor
Leclerc, Lucas, Ortiz-Guitierrez, Luis, Grijalva, Sebastian, Albrecht, Boris, Cline, Julia R. K., Elfving, Vincent E., Signoles, Adrien, Henriet, Loïc, Del Bimbo, Gianni, Sheikh, Usman Ayub, Shah, Maitree, Andrea, Luc, Ishtiaq, Faysal, Duarte, Andoni, Mugel, Samuel, Caceres, Irene, Kurek, Michel, Orus, Roman, Seddik, Achraf, Hammammi, Oumaima, Isselnane, Hacene, M'tamon, Didier
Machine Learning models capable of handling the large datasets collected in the financial world can often become black boxes expensive to run. The quantum computing paradigm suggests new optimization techniques, that combined with classical algorithms, may deliver competitive, faster and more interpretable models. In this work we propose a quantum-enhanced machine learning solution for the prediction of credit rating downgrades, also known as fallen-angels forecasting in the financial risk management field. We implement this solution on a neutral atom Quantum Processing Unit with up to 60 qubits on a real-life dataset. We report competitive performances against the state-of-the-art Random Forest benchmark whilst our model achieves better interpretability and comparable training times. We examine how to improve performance in the near-term validating our ideas with Tensor Networks-based numerical simulations.
ACES: Translation Accuracy Challenge Sets for Evaluating Machine Translation Metrics
Amrhein, Chantal, Moghe, Nikita, Guillou, Liane
As machine translation (MT) metrics improve their correlation with human judgement every year, it is crucial to understand the limitations of such metrics at the segment level. Specifically, it is important to investigate metric behaviour when facing accuracy errors in MT because these can have dangerous consequences in certain contexts (e.g., legal, medical). We curate ACES, a translation accuracy challenge set, consisting of 68 phenomena ranging from simple perturbations at the word/character level to more complex errors based on discourse and real-world knowledge. We use ACES to evaluate a wide range of MT metrics including the submissions to the WMT 2022 metrics shared task and perform several analyses leading to general recommendations for metric developers. We recommend: a) combining metrics with different strengths, b) developing metrics that give more weight to the source and less to surface-level overlap with the reference and c) explicitly modelling additional language-specific information beyond what is available via multilingual embeddings.